1. Field of Invention
This invention pertains to methods and systems for the care and maintenance of adult or child incontinence, and to a system which includes a novel kit containing disposable incontinence maintenance products and packaging convertible from storage and presentation of fresh incontinence maintenance products to a receptacle adapted to store and ultimately dispose of used and/or soiled incontinence maintenance products.
2. Description of the Related Art
Incontinence may be defined as the loss of bladder or bowel control. Babies and young children exhibit one form of incontinence until they have matured to the extent that they can control their bladder and bowel discharges. During this time of growth, there is a strong demand for convenient sanitary incontinence maintenance products. In addition to incontinence commonly associated with young children, urinary incontinence is reported to occur in as many as 200 million people worldwide. Similarly, approximately 25 million adult Americans reportedly experience transient or chronic urinary incontinence. Being often involuntary, incontinence discharges may occur without advance warning. The large occurrence of incontinence in the population has fostered a large demand for products associated with maintenance of such incontinences, such as diapers, wiping cloths, lotions, diaper changing mats, examination gloves, etc.
The handling of used and/or soiled (hereinafter “soiled”) items associated with rendering care to an individual who has experienced incontinence inherently involves a risk of exposure to pathogens associated with contact with human waste. In general, homes are historically considered reasonably (or at least acceptably) aseptic as to control the risk of such exposure. Attending to incontinence maintenance outside the home, however, can be more complicated in nature both due to the social aspect of attending to incontinence maintenance and due to the risk of exposure to potential infection. It is often understood that management of incontinence of either an adult or a child outside the home gives rise to an increased danger of exposure to pathogens. This is particularly true when traveling, on vacation, in attendance at public events and/or in other environments populated by or visited by persons from all walks of life. Publicly provided facilities for attending to the maintenance of incontinence are notoriously subject to lack of proper sanitation practices. Further, it is most common that such public facilities do not provide suitable aseptic supplies for attending to such incontinence.
While there are no known laws or regulations requiring that soiled incontinence maintenance products used in the home be handled and disposed of as a contaminated material, common reason nonetheless dictates that such soiled products should be handled and disposed of in a sanitary manner. Certain public health care institutions, however, may be required to dispose of soiled incontinence maintenance products as biohazard materials. Such classification of the soiled products gives rise to more stringent precautions against contamination of health care providers and their wards. For example, in many health care institutions, disposal of soiled incontinence management products dictates that, among other things, the soiled products be handled by a person wearing examination gloves. In any case, handling such soiled products using gloves is highly recommended. These gloves are useful in removal of soiled incontinence maintenance products from a patient. Further, many health care institutions require that the soiled items be placed in a container which is suitably designed to receive contaminated maintenance materials preparatory to their storage and ultimate disposal, such as by incineration.
Even where laws and regulations relating to management of incontinence of infants or small children are not applicable, good management practices dictate that institutions such as day-care facilities, nurseries, pre-kindergarten, etc. identify and take actions designed to prevent sources of irritation, pain, or contamination (including cross-contamination) associated with infant or small children incontinence management. Thus, the sanitary handling and ultimate disposal of soiled diapers, wiping cloths, etc., is paramount in both adult and child incontinence management irrespective of the locale of the incontinence maintenance event.
Among the potential problems associated with the management of incontinence of both infants and adults are storage and presentation of a selection of fresh incontinent maintenance products and ultimate disposal of soiled products, all in a sanitary manner. Accordingly, there is a very large demand for kits containing products useful in capturing bodily waste discharges and for convenient and sanitary availability of incontinence maintenance products, along with accompanying means for convenient and sanitary disposal of soiled products. For example, in the field of infant and small child diapers, it is common to package multiple diaper-change components into a kit and offer the same for retail sale. At times these kits are purchased by parents of infants and/or small children to be used by the parent or caretaker of the infant or child under conditions which offer little likelihood of exposure of the parent or caretaker to pathogens emanating from the waste or cross-contamination of waste to the child. In such kits, fresh products may often be folded into a relatively small volume so that several different products may be included in a diaper changing kit. However, disposal of used and/or soiled (hereinafter “soiled”) products poses a more serious problem. Specifically, fresh diapers may be folded and somewhat compressed for loading the same into a container, such as a bag. On the other hand, soiled diapers are of specific concern in that they are not readily foldable and therefore they occupy relatively greater space than do fresh folded diapers. Wiping cloths are likewise cumbersome to handle after use. The soiled nature of these products acerbates the difficulty of disposal.
Accordingly, certain of such kits often comprise a bag which is promoted as being usable both for initially containing fresh products and subsequently serving as the disposable vessel for soiled products. However, return of soiled products to the container from which they were originally removed can be most difficult for the reason that many such soiled products are more bulky than their fresh counterparts, and likewise, such prior containers for such products are small in size. In many such containers, the opening in the container from which the fresh products are retrieved is too small or too difficult to maintain in an open attitude to permit reasonable return of bulky soiled products to the container. Whereas such compact packaging of the products tends to facilitate storage and or handling of the initially sealed container of fresh products by an attendant, and are at times promoted as being convenient for storage prior to use, such containers are commonly not reusable as a receptacle for soiled products. Such prior containers for fresh products also exhibit resistance to being maintained open in a manner and for a time period sufficient for the soiled products to be inserted into the container.
Such prior art diaper changing kits suffer from further problems, such as lack of controlled retention of the incontinence management products within the bag in a manner which ensures ready delivery of the products in an appropriate order of their use, leading to confusion and potential contamination of one or more of the products in advance of its intended use. More specifically, most commonly desired incontinence maintenance products are by their nature non-uniform in size or shape, and therefore the container employed must provide an interior volume which will accommodate that product of the largest dimensions (e.g. width, length, and thickness). This sizing factor results in uncontrolled and differently directional movement of others of the products, hence displacement and/or intermixing within the bag of these products prior to their use. Thus, even though a collection of incontinence maintenance products may be initially orderly disposed within the container, due to the substantial difference between the required maximum size of the interior of the bag relative to the sizes of others of the various products, such orderly arrangement of the products may be lost during shipping and/or handling of the kit.
In certain situations, the management of incontinence within institutions of health and welfare services such as day care centers, nursing homes, and health care facilities is a time-consuming and costly activity. Such costs normally must be accounted for in anticipation of reimbursement of the institution by insurance companies, governmental reimbursement, or other source payment for such services. For this reason alone, such institutions may further use diaper-changing kits as a means for accounting for the number and type of incontinence maintenance products which are used for a patient for a given time period. For example, such institutions may deliver to a patient's room each day that quantity of kits anticipated to be needed for such day. At the end of the day, a count of the remaining kits and/or of the missing kits, if any, may be indicative of the number of diaper changes which have been rendered to the patient. Such data may be indicative of whether proper attention was paid to such patient during such given day. To this end, many prior art diaper changing kits suffer from the problem of a lack of tamper indicator means to clearly indicate whether such kit has been used and/or tampered with prior to a counting.
Therefore, there is a need in the health and patient welfare care industry for a kit which provides the items needed for a given incontinence maintenance event, (child or adult) and which further accommodates those ancillary matters such as costs, time of caretaker activities, compliance with applicable laws, regulations and/or good management practices relating to handling and disposal of soiled incontinence products, and accounting of quantities of incontinent maintenance products used for a given incontinence maintenance event.